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New Venture Checklist

The operating rhythm. Start-once jobs happen once. Everything else is a cadence or a trigger. Skip a cycle and the business goes dark.

Back to the Ventures index — open business opportunities at the intersection of AI and human potential.

The three picks — capital primitive, governance shape, coordination layer — get committed in the Capital & coordination block below. Pick deliberately, write it down, then run the cadence.

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Copy the block below into your own workspace. Tick as you go.

# Your Blueprint

## Start once

One-off jobs. Do each once. Tick it. Move on.

- [ ] Pick the problem you'll solve
- [ ] Pick the customer you'll serve
- [ ] Talk to ten of them
- [ ] Decide if it's worth doing
- [ ] Set the price
- [ ] Build the smallest version that works
- [ ] Sell it to the first customer
- [ ] Register the business
- [ ] Open the bank account
- [ ] Get the website live
- [ ] Set up payments
- [ ] Set up bookkeeping
- [ ] Get insurance
- [ ] Sign the founder agreement (if more than one)

## Capital & coordination

Pick the wrappers before you scale. Wrong picks are expensive to undo.

**Raise the capital**

- [ ] Pick the capital primitive — equity, token, revenue share, or contribution
- [ ] Decide the round shape — friends and family, angels, VC, treasury, or community
- [ ] Set the terms — valuation, vesting, lock-up, exit triggers
- [ ] Open the treasury — bank account plus on-chain wallet, split signing authority
- [ ] Write the founder agreement — equity, vesting, governance, what happens if someone leaves
- [ ] Decide what is liquid and what is locked, and for how long
- [ ] Define the kill criteria and the runway floor that triggers a raise

**Coordinate effort and energy**

- [ ] Map the crew — five seats: fund it, start it, run it, sell to, clear the path
- [ ] Decide what humans coordinate and what AI agents coordinate
- [ ] Pick the decision protocol — consensus, lazy consensus, prediction market, single-decider per domain
- [ ] Set the meeting cadence (or refuse to have meetings)
- [ ] Pick the source of truth for tasks, money, and customers
- [ ] Write down where attention should not go — what you refuse to do this quarter
- [ ] Decide the rhythm for re-allocating energy when something shifts

## Daily

Same jobs every cycle. Skip a cycle and the business goes dark.

- [ ] Ship the work
- [ ] Reply to customers
- [ ] Log the cash

## Weekly

- [ ] Review the sales pipeline
- [ ] Post content
- [ ] Pay suppliers
- [ ] Walk through the numbers

## Monthly

- [ ] Reconcile the books
- [ ] Run payroll
- [ ] Review customer retention
- [ ] Test the backups

## Quarterly

- [ ] File taxes
- [ ] Send the investor update
- [ ] Review pricing
- [ ] Review the team

## Yearly

- [ ] Annual accounts
- [ ] Strategy review
- [ ] Renew insurance
- [ ] Renew domains and licences

## When something happens

- [ ] New customer signs up → onboard them
- [ ] Customer complains → respond within a day
- [ ] Customer leaves → ask why, write it down
- [ ] Cash dips below three months → cut costs, raise money, or both
- [ ] New hire starts → onboard them
- [ ] Hire underperforms → coach, then decide
- [ ] Competitor launches something → study it, respond if needed
- [ ] Press or social mentions you → amplify it
- [ ] Product breaks → fix it, write up what went wrong
- [ ] Legal threat arrives → call a lawyer before answering
- [ ] Big deal closes → celebrate, capture the story
- [ ] You hit a milestone → tell the world
- [ ] Investor introduction lands → reply within 48 hours, lead with cash flow
- [ ] Co-founder leaves → trigger the agreement, do not negotiate from scratch
- [ ] Decision is stuck → call the protocol, do not call a meeting
- [ ] Tokenization opportunity surfaces → decide on terms, not enthusiasm
- [ ] Energy of the crew drops → name it in the next stand-up, do not wait for the quarterly

## Fulfilment check

Run every month. If any answer is no, stop and fix it.

- [ ] Am I proud of what we shipped?
- [ ] Would the customer recommend us without being asked?
- [ ] Is the team okay?
- [ ] Is the money working without us hating the work?
- [ ] Would I start this business again, knowing what I know now?

Questions

Which cadence in this blueprint have you quietly stopped running — and what has gone dark because of it?

  • Which single checkbox would change your next thirty days if it flipped to done tomorrow?
  • If you had to show one artifact to a serious customer next week, which would it be — and what is missing?
  • Which of the fulfilment checks would you rather not answer honestly — and what does that tell you?
  • If the capital primitive you picked were wrong, when would you find out — and what would the switching cost be?
  • Which coordination decision are you re-litigating each week because no protocol owns it?
  • Which seat on the crew is paid in money, which is paid in tokens, and which is paid in trust — and is that mix going to compound or unravel?